I wonder. I remember before emissions, what's underneath a car hood was relatively organized and simple. Then with emissions it became a maze of vacuum hoses and so much other nonsense.

then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess.

There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel:

https://github.com/seL4/seL4/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4

"with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff)

maybe we can still have niches like this.

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pona-a 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what happens with scale...

The purpose of a car itself didn't change. But the massive inflated demand, as our city planners decided every adult must be put in a rolling metal cage to participate in society, changed the environment it was originally designed for.

Now it's a matter of geopolitical stability, or even basic human habitability of these spaces, that a car converts as much of that chemical energy into movement, and releases as little toxic byproducts in the process. Whereas before, that cost, at scale, was small enough to neglect.

Just like a modern CPU evolved into an incomprehensible mess, even though the basic consumer needs hadn't changed much, because the politics of computing forced them to run expanding institutional cruft at reasonable speeds, on battery-powered always-on addiction machines.

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toasty228 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"

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m463 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again.

another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit

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ssl-3 5 hours ago | parent [-]

PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though.

I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card.

Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces.

A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.)

I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.)

It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs.

It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?

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m463 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Am I missing something?

lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood"

And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again.

but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way.

started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again.

in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday.

maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.

	▲	ssl-3 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah. Yeah, I wasn't quite picking up what you were putting down. :) And I'd apologize for writing about old computers, except I enjoy writing about old computers. I never had much experience with S-100, though; my days of hands-in computing started with PCs in the 80s and I missed the earlier eras. Anyway, I think you're right: The bot will continue to improve. It will get simpler to operate, and it will also generate cleaner code. But with a twist: That generated code won't become cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for humans to understand and work on. Instead, it will instead get cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for bots to understand and work on. (Why use many token when few do trick?)